Well, I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that... are you suggesting that Harvard students were less intelligent when a 3.2 was the average GPA than now (when the average is 3.6-3.7)? Sure it's "hard" to get into Harvard for undergrad, but that doesn't mean everyone deserves an A for every class.
So you're an average Ivy student GPAwise and got an MCAT score in the ~95th percentile. I don't think that demonstrates that the average student at H/Y/P could do so.
I've discussed this topic on these forums ad nauseam already, so I'm not going to try that hard anymore…(
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/thr...am-8-2-2013-journey-to-a-45-ha.1011056/page-7)
Yes, I believe current HYP students are more intelligent (book-smart, nothing else; not going to extrapolate too far) than their counterparts decades ago. The gigantic increase in the applicant pool allows our admissions offices to cherry pick the best they want. When the average GPA was a 3.2, Ivies were filled with rich, white men wearing Gant. That is not a very representative population to compare the current students to. The current average for HY is around 3.55 (from Crimson, YDN, and respective OIRs; gradeinflation.com is garbage).
We don't all get As for every single class; an average of 3.55 mandates that a good number of A- and B+ be given. 62% of grades given at Yale were A- and above in the past academic year. Is this inflated? Perhaps. Is it
rampant inflation and undeserved? There's no way to accurately defend either side of that statement like when difficulty level, student caliber, and other related metrics are inherently subjective and cannot be described properly to someone who has only taken classes at one institution. i.e., you won't understand what I mean when I say Ivy students
all work extremely hard and perform at very high levels all the time, and I won't understand what you mean when you say that we're not too special in that regard. It's all relative. I don't know how I'd do at a flagship, and you don't know how you'd do at an Ivy or top-tier.
I consider myself the average Ivy case. (I may even be a little below that, who knows.) Average applicant at Yale (we don't screen like JHU; everyone gets a letter if you ask, even for DO) has a 3.65/34. Average at Harvard is 3.67/35. I think that's pretty good evidence that the average premed at HY tends to get >90th percentile fairly consistently. Advisors (we actually have some capable and knowledgable ones) tend to expect a ≥33 from premeds.
Also, keep in mind that the easiest graders are not in the natural sciences. It's really the humanities and social sciences where
sometimes getting an A is a joke. I've taken history classes that are jokes, but also political science ones that required a **** ton of work and was hard as dried horse dung. But since the majority of premeds at such liberal arts institutions dabble in a ton of non-sciencey subjects, it's much more complicated than it is ostensibly.
Conclusion: our grades may be inflated by a little bit, but definitely not as rampantly as outsiders think. This is not undeserved; when average SAT scores keep climbing as the students get increasingly book-smart due to the Common App and admissions outreach, it should not be blasphemous for grades to rise accordingly. (I would be concerned if grades did not improve because then, either 1) professors are being dicks and forcefully grading people down for little reason other than to keep status quo, or 2) our problems in pre-tertiary education are even more severe than we'd think. For med school admissions, the effect of "inflation" is negligible because adcoms definitely know where we all compare to one another (based on past performance of similar students), and we always have the MCAT as a [semi-useful] equalizer.
